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The violin? Arden shook herself out of this fantasy. But the hope in her chest remained, expanding like a balloon. She straightened her shoulders.

“Sure, I can give them a call. Should I say the reservation is for a special occasion, or…?”

Peter let air out of his lips. “Pffft.” It sounded exactly like a balloon deflating. “I wouldn’t call it a special occasion, no. Sheila’s back in town and wants to talk.”

“Sheila?” Any remaining hope was stamped out by this information. Peter was seeing his ex-wife?

He drained the rest of his cappuccino and then leaned in conspiratorially. Arden could smell the coffee on his breath and the aftershave on his jaw. The effect was intoxicating; she tried not to breathe.

“We’ve seen each other a few times in recent months. It usually turns into something… carnal.”

Arden cough-gagged and pressed her knuckles to her mouth, unsure if she was about to laugh, cry, or vomit.

Peter didn’t seem to notice. “I think she might be here today to discuss the possibility of getting back together.”

He gazed out the window again, apparently lost in tender thoughts, as Arden tried to get air into her lungs. She felt like she was choking.

He wanted to get back together with his ex? The woman who had told him, during one of their fights, that she wanted a man who did something more with his life than working in education? Arden could still recall the way Peter had relayed this story, drawing out the word education with such disdain. The woman who had taken off on a flight to Las Vegas after signing the divorce papers, never to return?

Except, apparently, she had.

“Eight o’clock should give me plenty of time to show my face at the party.”

Show his face? Arden tried to hide her disappointment. She had, characteristically, gotten carried away with daydreams about tonight’s party. She’d pictured locking eyes with Peter across the room as everyone raised their glasses in a toast. Later, the two of them would playfully tussle over a white elephant gift, followed by a romantic encounter in the coatroom at the end of the night.

And now he was talking about the party like he wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. So he could have a date with his ex.

Arden wasn’t delusional. She knew most of this “relationship” with Peter was in her head. He was her boss. Nothing had ever actually happened between them. But she couldn’t help the way she felt about him. And she’d spent the last three years trying to get him to realize how lost he would be without her.

But of course he hadn’t realized. He never would. He was older, more sophisticated—and so was Sheila. Arden was desperate, uninteresting, and awkward. And just now, she felt incredibly stupid for expending so much time and energy on this man who barely even looked at her.

“Is that the time?” she said hastily, glancing at her bare wrist. “I have to get to Pilates.” She had never done Pilates in her life.

“The dinner reservation?” Peter reached out to her, half standing in his confusion.

Arden looked down at his fingertips grazing her arm. It took every ounce of her self-control not to sit back down and say, “Yes, of course.”

“Sorry, don’t want to be late. See you at the party.”

Without looking back, she bustled out of the coffee shop.

Once she was back in her car, it dawned on her with startling clarity: She had no desire to go to the holiday party anymore.

That evening, instead of wearing a sparkly green gown and celebrating with her colleagues, Arden wore flannel reindeer pajamas and scrolled on her phone as a true-crime show played on the television.

She had not stopped crying all day.

She could not believe she had spent years—literal years—pining after such an impossibility. And it was not the first time she’d done this. In high school, it had been the football quarterback, the most popular guy in school, who didn’t even know her name. In college, it was a teaching assistant who, looking back now, she was pretty sure was gay.

She blamed her parents.

They’d gotten divorced when Arden was eleven, and she’d made it her personal mission to make them happy. Her mom and dad had both been sad with the way their lives had turned out, and Arden had wanted to make sure they at least felt like they had a perfect daughter. She could give them that much.

Thanks to therapy, she now realized that this was a huge burden for a young girl to take on and that she wasn’t responsible for her parents’ feelings. But some habits were hard to change.

Like wasting her life by loving someone completely wrong for her.

If she was honest with herself, she’d been hyperfocused on the fantasy of something happening with Peter this holiday season. And it wasn’t hard to uncover the reasons why. This year, she was more alone than she had ever been. Everyone was happily coupled up except for her.